Several past EBF speakers have made their lecture notes viewable online. Click on the above title to browse these documents.
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Sixteen Central Ideas of the Theory of Generative Death Anxiety |
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Friday, 18 November 2011 12:53 |
- All living creatures have a strong, even overwhelming urge to continue living; yet our entire ecosystem would collapse without universal mortality (every living thing dies); thus, there is a basic paradox at the hear of the living cosmos.
- Human beings are animals, first and foremost, sharing completely in the evolution of species on this earth, and large chunks of human emotions, social life and basic physical and nervous makeup reflect that shared animal heritage.
- Human beings have the intelligence to think abstractly; this is in essence what sets human psychology and cognition apart from animal psychology and cognition (This is the most general statement of human uniqueness, but only humans have many ending propositions in literature, e.g., have a concept of zero, have language, do mathematics, understand negation, practice religion, etc. All of these and many more would be seen as cases in point of the ability to think abstractly).
- Because it is rooted in the ability to think abstractly, human cognition is able to grasp the paradoxical Mortality Principle on which our ecosystem/cosmos is based at the deepest levels, and feel it intensely qua paradox.
- The most important features of human psychology are born out of the clash between the overwhelming urge to continue living and the cognitive awareness of universal mortality; this recognition of the inevitability of the death (the paradoxical Mortality Principle) creates a reservoir of potentially immobilizing, debilitating anxiety.
- There are defense mechanisms in individual psychology (e.g., denial, repression, projection, displacement, dissociation, rationalization, intellectualization, identification, reaction formation, sublimation, humor. There are more than 20 in the specialized literature). Each of these mechanisms manifests itself in creative and destructive forms.
- Likewise, there are social defense mechanisms, habitual patterns of collective behavior aimed at defending established social formations (ritual, scapegoating, segregation, denigration, assimilation, annihilation, etc.). Each of these mechanisms manifests itself in creative and destructive forms.
- The entire array of individual and social defense mechanisms are regularly employed to maintain individual and social equanimity in reaction to threats of death, and also in reaction to the symbolic threats of death contained in recognition of the cosmic Mortality Principle. Such defense mechanisms probably originated in, but certainly were strategically contoured in their contemporary form by, this need for anxiety control in the face of mortality awareness. In short, our highly developed intelligence caused the anxiety problem in the first place, and also comes forth with at least the provisional solution to the anxiety problem.
- One very central and ubiquitous anxiety-compensatory movie is to transfer the urge for continued living from the physical realm to the symbolic realm; the organismic urge for continued living becomes channeled into the urge for immortality in the symbolic realm.
- The urge for symbolic immortality is the source of very large chunks of human creativity and life-affirming energies; it is the underlying function of culture/religion to serve as venues through which people achieve and maintain a sense of participation in symbolic immortality (soul survival, larger-than-life projects, etc.).
- All cultures/religions are on the one level fictional, since t hey all promise something (immortality) on which they cannot deliver; however, they are all also potentially true, in that each provides some functional viability for anxiety-compensation. Human individual and social life without such fictions would be unbearable and impossible.
- There is power in numbers; the more you rub shoulders only with people who believe in the same cultural/religious fictions, the more plausible those fictions become (we all tell the same stories!).
- People who do NOT share our cultural/religious assumptions (stories, fictions) are a big problem, since by their very existence the cast doubt n the absolute certainty of our truth (revealing its fiction nature to us) and thus expose us again to the repressed anxiety they function to allay in the first place.
- Hence, culturally/religiously Dissimilar Others may be a creative source for helping us widen and enhance our own vision; or, they may be encountered in the most literal sense, as enemies.
- Modern, post-Darwinian human beings are more likely in the first place to suspect the fictional character of their cultural/religious stories/truths than those of previous generations, and this is further aggravated because improvements in communications and travel technology force moderns to confront the reality of the culturally/religiously Dissimilar Other on a regular basis.
- Future human well-being, and possibly even simple human survival, will depend on learning to substitute more creative manifestations of the individual and social defense mechanisms against the anxiety provoked by the religiously/culturally Dissimilar Other for the more destructive manifestations.
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Paul Tillich and Ernest Becker: Cultural Meaning and the Encounter with Death |
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Tuesday, 28 July 2009 11:55 |
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Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels.
Philip Larkin, “Aubade"1
Degrees we know, unknown in days before;
The light is greater, hence the shadow more;
Herman Melville, Clarel2
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker died in 1973. He won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1974 for his remarkable book, The Denial of Death. The book shows how death-anxiety conditions culture, religion, and human behavior generally. Anxiety, Becker argued, generates heroic cultural activity that gives meaning to our lives. Yet death-anxiety also underlies the inclination of our species toward hatred, the collective madness of war, and the killing of innocent people, the many forms of evil, in short, that make history, as Hegel called it, a “butcher’s bench.”
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Who in their right mind wants war? |
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Sunday, 01 September 2002 03:00 |
Further engagement with Christopher Hedges' book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
Despite the fact that we pride ourselves on be a rational species, warfare appears to be one of the invariable constants in human history. From William James' The Moral Equivalent to War (1910) to the recent highly acclaimed book of Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, those seeking an end to the institution of warfare have been suggesting that internal, spiritual factors are at least as important in contributing to our addiction to warfare as are external, material factors. Liechty reads this tradition with special focus on interpretive insights drawn from psychological works of Otto Rank, Ernest Becker and Robert Jay Lifton.
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Thinking about Seneca's Thoughts on Dying |
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Saturday, 01 September 2001 03:00 |
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Seneca (C. 4 B.C.- A.D.65), a Roman essayist, philosopher, playwright, and tutor to Nero, writes a short essay about his asthma, which he calls "difficulty in breathing." Seneca says that he has suffered just about all that can go wrong with a man (he said that he would have committed suicide but that his father would have been unable to bear the loss), and he finds his asthma the worst ailment, an assessment he thinks we should find reasonable since with this affliction one is constantly at one's last breath. Roman doctors nicknamed asthma "rehearsing death." Anyone who has seen someone suffer a serious asthma attack know the aptness of the phrase the Roman doctors used.
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The Media Re-victimization Thesis Reconsidered |
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Monday, 01 January 2001 03:00 |
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Tom Duncanson's paper (his field is Communications Ethics) was at the heart of the three-day LOV VI program. Prior to his presentation, psychiatrist Sandra Bloom set the stage in two excellent discussions of trauma, one in a pre-LOV session with news reporters from around the state plus faculty of the University of Washington School of Communications, and EBF speakers. Then that evening she gave the keynote address for the weekend. So reflections back to the previous day are to be found in the Duncanson paper.
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